On Invoking Historical Parallels

Illustration by Abro

Nadeem Paracha in The Dawn

Recently, Orya Maqbool Jan, the retired bureaucrat who now fancies himself as an ideologue and political commentator, warned that if the ‘establishment’ continues to support the current government, Pakistan will be rocked by a revolutionary uprising like the one that erupted in Iran in 1979.

Then there is the former prime minister Imran Khan who was ousted in April 2022 and is now claiming that, if he is arrested, people would pour out on the roads like thousands of Turks did during a failed coup attempt against Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.

Pakistani politicians and ideologues often refer to contemporary dramatic events elsewhere to conjure alarmist possibilities in their own country. Only rarely do they refer to past events that took place in Pakistan. At least not in this context.

For example, no one speaks of the violent 1983 movement against the dictator Ziaul Haq, which almost yanked Sindh away from the rest of the country. Or very few now speak of the mass uprising against the Ayub Khan dictatorship in 1968.

Surely, our latest batch of sudden revolutionaries such as Jan and Khan could have given examples closer to home to forewarn the coming of an apocalypse in case things didn’t go the way they want them to.

Maybe they believe that examples like the 1968 and the 1983 movements, or even the 1977 uprising against the ZA Bhutto regime, or for that matter, the 2007 Lawyers’ Movement against the Pervez Musharraf dictatorship, were not dramatic enough? Perhaps. Indeed, images of public executions and firing squads and burning buildings from the Iranian Revolution, and visuals of people lying in front of tanks in Turkey, are certainly more exciting.

In 1969, when protests, mainly by leftist youth, had managed to force Ayub Khan to resign, the Islamist ideologue Abul Ala Maududi warned that the youth may face brutal retaliations from those who did not agree with their ideology. Maududi referenced the violence that Indonesian communists encountered in 1965-66.

In 1965, 500,000 to 1,000,000 communists and alleged communist sympathisers were massacred by the Indonesian armed forces and by right-wing Islamist groups when the military accused the largest communist party in Indonesia of murdering six military officers and attempting a coup.

But whereas Maududi, perturbed by the increasing leftist sentiments among Pakistan’s youth, warned about a retaliation against them in the mould of the 1965 Indonesian massacres, the retaliation did take place two years later — but 2,000 km away in the erstwhile East Pakistan.

What’s more, Maududi’s political party sent volunteers to facilitate Pakistan’s armed forces to eliminate Bengali nationalists.

This begs the question whether the alarmism that references dramatic upheavals elsewhere is actually wishful thinking on the part of those who use it to conjure what might happen in Pakistan? Their ‘warnings’ might actually be desires or even fantasies. After all, wouldn’t men such as Khan love seeing his supporters lying in front of tanks, or Jan relish the idea of an Iran-type revolution in Pakistan?

The reason that these remain alarmist fantasies inspired by events outside Pakistan is because Pakistan’s diverse ethnic and sectarian demography and the strongly unified nature of its armed forces are not compatible with the aforementioned events in Iran and Turkey — two countries that enjoy more sectarian/religious and ethnic homogeneity.

Yet, the reference of the 1979 Iranian uprising was all the rage in Pakistan across the 1980s. Ironically, it was mostly referred to by those in power. For example, in 1980, a sitting minister in the Zia dictatorship explained Zia’s Hudood Ordinances as deterrents formulated “to avoid an Iran-like revolution in Pakistan.” The stringent ordinances were described as ‘Islamic’ by the dictatorship, but were largely seen as being draconian and even “barbaric” by Zia’s opponents.

The minister was thus warning that, without such ordinances, the “Islam-loving people of Pakistan” would rise up and demand Shariah rule and that Zia was fulfilling this demand in a more measured manner and therefore mitigating the kind of commotion seen in Iran in 1979.

Even till the first Nawaz Sharif government (1990-93), Sharif was warning that if he did not continue “Zia’s mission”, the country would face an Iran-like uprising. In this case, however, it wasn’t wishful thinking, really. It was a warning to those who were his opponents.

In a way, Nawaz was telling them (as had Zia) to better tolerate his strand of Islamism than the strands being demanded by militant clerics. But why refer to the 1979 Iranian revolution in this respect, when one could refer to the vicious 1953 and 1974 anti-Ahmadiyya movements? Of course, after 1974, these movements became constitutionally justified and couldn’t be used as warnings of any kind.

The devastating Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) was once another favourite alarmist example. In the late 1980s, when ethnic violence erupted in Karachi, the then chief of the Mohajir Qaumi Movement (MQM), Altaf Hussain, often warned that Karachi would become like Beirut, the Lebanese city that was ravaged by the civil war. Images of that civil war were still fresh in people’s minds. So, instead of, say, referring to war-torn Dhaka of 1971 in former East Pakistan, Hussain chose to speak of Beirut.

The interesting bit is that, whether it was 1965’s Indonesia, 1980’s Beirut, 1979’s Iran or 2016’s Turkey, none of these references are very convincing in Pakistan’s context because the dynamics of Pakistan’s political and economic cleavages are nothing like those of Indonesia, Iran, Lebanon or Turkey.

And certainly not like those of 18th century France. Yes, Pakistani politicians are also very fond of warning about an uprising like the 18th century French Revolution. Why not refer to the 1857 uprising against the British in India instead, one wonders?

Most of these referential warnings look and sound like alarmist fantasies more than an outcome of any informed analysis. Pakistan’s 75 years are full of events that our alarmists can conjure. Yet, they continue to look elsewhere, blissfully ignorant of the fact that conditions elsewhere are quite different than what they are in Pakistan.

The reading of history by our alarmists is alarmingly sensationalist.

The Expert

 

Why do political leaders stride into the same trap, even having witnessed the fate of those who went before them?

Steve Richards: History repeats itself in Libya

Tuesday, 2 August 2011 in The Independent

 

Some of the best thrillers depend on the audience knowing in advance that a deadly outcome is unavoidable. We sit, watch and wait, gripped with fear as the inevitable end looms. And often the characters suspect they are making the wrong moves but cannot stop themselves from doing so.

The same pattern applies in politics. Governments tend to make the same colossal mistakes as their predecessors. Leading figures recognise the errors when they were committed the first time around but then proceed to make a similar set of misjudgements. It's as if they are trapped by dark forces beyond their control.

This is what has happened with David Cameron's response to the crisis in Libya. He watched the first time around, recognised the mistakes and repeated them. The invasion of Iraq was on a much bigger scale and conducted without the support of the UN. Nonetheless, there are precise parallels with Libya. George Bush and Tony Blair invaded Iraq without having a clear outcome in mind. Their official war aims as far as they were specified did not include the removal of Saddam, although that was the outcome they hoped for.

Both leaders assumed that Iraqis would welcome them as liberators and that democracy would follow. As with the earlier war in Afghanistan, Blair declared that financial costs would be relatively low. In the build-up to Iraq, most newspapers hailed Blair for his political courage, even though he was siding with the most powerful military force in the world against an ageing tyrant. We know what followed.

More importantly, David Cameron knew what followed. Friends of Cameron insist he had deep doubts about the war in Iraq at the time, although he voted for it. Later, as Leader of the Opposition, he made one of his best speeches, during which he argued that a lesson of Iraq was that countries could not be bombed into democracy. With Cameron it is not always easy to judge whether he meant what he said or was seeking crudely to widen his party's appeal by belatedly marking distance for Iraq. Still, that was what Cameron argued, in an extensively briefed speech. I recall talking to him at length about it at the time. We must presume he recognised complexity and nuance as the calamity of Iraq unfolded.

Yet earlier this year Cameron rushed to the Commons to make an emergency statement. He supported a no-fly zone over Libya and had taken the lead in securing it. The aim was to protect the Libyans but he hoped the outcome would be the removal of Gaddafi, although this was not an objective. The cost would be a few million pounds. In large parts of the media Cameron was hailed for his leadership and courage.

A few months later and we are in another familiar phase of the pattern. The dictator is still there. The alternative might well be as unsavoury. Questions are being asked about why military action is taken in Libya, but not in Syria.

Here the Defence Select Committee estimates the costs of the campaign have exceeded early predictions and have already risen to beyond £200m. There is no end to the conflict in sight, so that figure will continue to rise. The same committee calculates that the cost of Afghanistan to the UK Government has been at least £18bn and it is probably a lot more than that.

Cameron and George Osborne argue that spending went out of control in the early years of this century. They may have a case, but in terms of the specifics they supported all the areas where expenditure rose. One of them was the cost of fighting major wars. Here we go again.

Why do political leaders stride into the same trap, having resolved not to do so when witnessing the fate of those that went before them? Cameron is not the first to do so. On the domestic front in the 1970s there was a similar eerie pattern. Ted Heath got into fatal difficulties as he attempted to impose a pay policy. His opponent, Harold Wilson, was scathing until he won an election. Shortly afterwards, he also imposed one. Jim Callaghan was also sceptical but succumbed in the same way and was brought down by it. In the end, all three Prime Ministers followed the same deadly route having resolved not to do so. They could see no alternative. They were too scared of breaking with corporatist orthodoxy. Having been brought up politically in the 1930s, they feared the social and economic consequence of high unemployment.

On Libya Cameron could see no alternative. He feared a slaughter. He is the heir to Blair and as he contemplated what to do about Libya, he reflected on his hero and what he would have done. Cameron was brought up politically at a time when Britain deployed military force without asking too many awkward questions. Now he is trapped, just as the leaders in the 1970s were in relation to their economic policies.

I make no prescription as to what outsiders can do to tame selected tyrants but we know from recent conflicts what does not work. Or do we? We are about to do so. Orthodoxies change and leaders learn, but after knowing the risks involved, they still make the same miscalculations as those who preceded them.